Because of the mobility of communication units operating within a cellular system, information with respect to the operation of the mobile unit within the communication network must be established. Often this information, in the form of network parameters, is communicated to the mobile unit in a forward control channel in order to allow the mobile unit to adjust its operation. For example, a mobile unit may be provided network parameters for a particular communication network when establishing communication with a network in order to adjust the mobile unit's operation to coincide with that of the network.
Typically, network parameters include network wide parameters such as communication thresholds, e.g., a threshold at which a signal strength handoff might be requested. Likewise, the network parameters include network timing information, such as search windows. Additionally, network parameters may include information localized to a particular portion of the communication network. Such localized network parameters include individual cell, sector or beam traffic density, or related capacity parameters, and neighboring cell lists, or where multi-sectored or multibeam cells are used antenna sector/beam lists, in order to allow a mobile unit operating within a particular area to scan or monitor signals from nearby base sites.
The current state of the art in cellular networks is to fix the network parameters at the time the network is deployed. Accordingly, the network parameters selected are adjusted to achieve an acceptable compromise between conditions from all the varying traffic conditions that may be experienced in the network. As such, the selection of parameters involve trade offs in performance and are not optimized for each geographic area or every given time of day or traffic loading condition that may exist. This yields a static type network plan and network optimization, which does not take into account varying traffic conditions and varying interference conditions that the network will be subject to on a daily or hourly basis.
Cellular networks are subject to highly time variable traffic loads. In particular, the performance of code division multiple access (CDMA) networks, where all users share the same frequency, is very sensitive to the traffic density as a function of geographic location as well as the amount of interference that is present in the network. Accordingly, system operators typically notice increases in the drop call rate in specific locations, or network performance problems in specific locations, as the traffic flow changes based on time of day, day of the week, or specific traffic hot spots ancillary to sporting events or traffic jams, for example. Therefore, the localized traffic handling ability of the network should change based on how the users are distributed.
However, during the life span of the network, parameters are changed relatively infrequently, certainly not in a real-time or dynamic basis as the traffic patterns or interference patterns change. Therefore, there exists a need in the art for a system and method of dynamically adjusting network parameters.
A need also exists in the art for a system and method for adjusting network parameters for a particular portion of the network based on localized conditions. A further need exists in the art for adjusting network parameters based on any desired scale, such as network wide or particular portions of the network, cells, sectors, beams or mobiles.